The Matrix Remixed!

For the last year or so I’ve been wondering what the next step is beyond post-modernism. If that hasn’t been the burning question on your mind, I can’t blame you. I think that most people don’t even notice it any more. The easy availability of digital copies of almost everything has made the creation of new meaning from artistic artifacts that already exist part of our everyday life.

In contemporary music, this has been going on since the late 70s. Luciano Berio’s amazing tour-de-force, his “Sinfonia,” is a great example and on the other side of the spectrum is John Oswald’s Plunderphonics. He was obviously an early adopter on the non-classical side and he paid for that, when the industry didn’t really know how to deal with what he had created – and chose to make him take it off the market. Since then, the whole DJ genre has evolved, based on using records that already exist, as a way of creating new music in a new context.

Remixing and re-making is nothing new, but it just seemed to hit me when I was working my way through the music for this weekend’s shows. There’s a maturity and depth to some of these musicians who aren’t just using bits and pieces that already exist, but are building the foundation of their craft on this idea of renovating art. Early on Friday night, we’ll hear Tortoise and Bonnie Prince Billy doing Elton John’s “Daniel” and right afterwards, its Margaret Leng Tan’s quirky version of “Eleanor Rigby.” They’re just a warm-up for Four Tet and his awesome re-thinking of Caribou’s “Melody Day.”

But the real shocker for me was learning that the Montreal band Misteur Valaire are releasing their CDs under The Creative Commons Copyright license. This is a whole new way of thinking about what we create. It goes way beyond so called “fair use” or peer-to-peer sharing. It assumes that we can make use of things that already exist, while it continues to recognize the role of the original creator. Up to this point, most remixing has been done in a rigidly controlled environment, often to give new life to music that’s already sold itself silly in the market. The results can be great, like Psapp’s take on Astrud Gilberto’s “Bim Bom” from the new Verve Remixed 4, that’ll show up in the first hour of Saturday’s show. But think about Aphex Twin’s famous 26 Mixes For Cash. At that point, the industry was chasing him all over the place, because an Aphex Twin remix had the potential to rejuvenate a career with the same kind of certainty that appearing in a Quentin Tarantino movie would for an overexposed actor.

In the end it’s probably all about the money – as usual. Our consumer culture has given us access to the whole world of art. All we have to do is watch the commercials and put up with the banner ads. But as we move into the new on-demand world, somebody has to come up with a new way of making sure the artists get paid. For their part, artists have to learn to accept that once they’ve finished their creation that it might take on a life of its own. Think about the Rolling Stone’s iconic anthem “Satisfaction.” How many times have you heard it used to sell stuff on TV? On the other hand, listen to Prince’s take on Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” or Stina Nordenstam’s re-think of Prince’s “Purple Rain.” For me, they’re in the same league with Glenn Gould’s interpretations of Bach. Blasphemy? Maybe, but they all present compelling artistic statements that reflect the “remixing” artist as much or more than they do the originals.

There are still lots of new original voices appearing in our world – despite what we might think after a particularly bad run of TV shows. I’ll just give one example. CocoRosie have a new single out for download and it’ll kick the show off on Saturday night. But this idea of renovating music that already exists is appealing. It’s no different aesthetically than taking an old house with good bones and completely overhauling it, so you can have a to-die-for bathroom or kitchen. I might not do it to a Frank Lloyd Wright original, but you have to be a pretty special person to live in a house that unique anyway.

So I welcome the remixers. They’ve already taken on classics like Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and Handel’s “Messiah.” I think this new “genre” is just beginning to spread its wings.